1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to electrical pickups for stringed musical instruments and comprising a coil wound around a permanent magnet.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Modern stringed musical instruments are commonly fitted with such electrical pickups, this being particularly the case with guitars as used for the playing of so-called "pop" music. With such a guitar what is referred to as the tonal variety thereof is fundamentally determined by the actual type of pickup used. The pickups at present in use may be categorised as being of either "hum-bucking" or single-coil type.
A hum-bucking pickup, sometimes referred to as "a hum-bucker" is a twin unit with two coils wound in opposite directions relative to their respective magnets--the coils may be wound in the same direction and the magnets oppositely orientated, or the coils may be wound in opposite directions and the magnets similarly orientated. With such a pickup the coils can be connected to a pre-amplifier so that any mains voltage hum or radio interference induced in one of the coils is cancelled out by that induced in the other. A single-coil pickup, as its name implies, consists of a single coil wound around a fixed magnet.
Guitars are commonly fitted with two or even three pickups spaced longitudinally of the strings below the latter, these pickups being selectively switchable to change the musical characteristics of the amplified sound produced by the instrument. One, or more, of these pickups may be of hum-bucking type, but each is essentially of one type or the other. Even when two single-coil pickups are switched for use together, connected to the same pre-amplifier input, they cannot operate as a hum-bucking arrangement because they both have the same coil/magnet orientation. This limits the range of tonal variety obtainable.